We don’t need to tell you the American electorate is polarized these days. You just have to tune in to any call-in show or even make an injudicious casual remark at Thanksgiving dinner to realize how personal our political identities are and how emotional discussing the issues and values surrounding them can be. So we decided it would be interesting to ask one Republican and one Democrat why they did what is unthinkable to so many: switch parties. Two portraits of political discontent…

The first thing you should know about Mark Patrosso is that he was very involved in the Republican Party for a very long time. At just 9-years-old, he watched the entire 1964 Republican Convention when Barry Goldwater was nominated — even though his parents weren’t interested in politics.

If anything, Patrosso should have been a Democratic kid. He spent his childhood in East Detroit, a working-class Democratic suburb of the Motor City. In junior high, he says other kids probably thought he was a little weird when he volunteered to fill a display case with information on presidential candidate Richard Nixon. “I remember going into the local Nixon headquarters, picking up buttons, reading profiles,” Patrosso recalls.

Patrosso was just crazy for politics. “I probably actually read the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence in junior high and high school, or referred back just to understand what they really meant,” he says. “I’m not sure that my peers even cared.”
Rockefeller Republicans in particular spoke to Patrosso. They were socially moderate and open to compromise, but also fiscally conservative, concerned with efficient governance, and strong on national defense. He spoke up for these values even as he entered college at the left-leaning University of Michigan in the 1970s. Looking back, he says, he thinks he knows why protecting minority opinion was so important to him.

“Probably, subconsciously, I knew I was gay. I wasn’t the same as the other guys,” he says. “I guess I had a particular sensitivity in my long-term political views in making sure I was out there, that I was going to protect who I was, being a little different.”

In 1980 Patrosso moved to California to work for Lockheed. He found Santa Clara County Republicans shared his views, and he met members of the Log Cabin Republicans, an organization of gay and lesbian Republicans. He felt like he was finally meeting his people.

“I’m gay and in the Republican Party, and here I am all of a sudden meeting a bunch of people who are openly gay and in the Republican Party!” he remembers. “Okay, there’s more of me here.” Soon, Patrosso founded the Silicon Valley branch of Log Cabin Republicans, and he even became a delegate for the state party.

Patrosso’s belief in the Republican Party remained rock solid for decades but, he admits, small fissures began to surface. They started with the rise of the religious right. “There wasn’t any room for compromise,” Patrosso says, “and they made it their business to outvote us and get the most extreme views in the party platform or positions on ballot initiatives.”

During George W. Bush’s presidency, Patrosso felt distanced from a Republican Party he believed was moving away from its fundamental beliefs. “They weren’t managing the budget, and they were being reckless and arrogant on the world stage,” he says. “That’s when I started questioning: ‘Really, is this a Republican Party I want to continue to be a part of?’”

The reason Patrosso gravitated toward politics at all has a lot to do with a simple belief — that the best politicians serve the people. After the 2008 election, when he thought congressional Republicans cared less about running the government than about unseating Obama, Patrosso was horrified.

“They were just interested in saying ‘no,’” he says. “That’s not being a good public servant. That, probably more than anything else, started to rip away the last shreds of my support for the Republican Party and their leadership today.”

“My whole existence as a gay Republican with my Democratic gay friends has been to justify why I’m still a Republican, and I ran out of arguments,” he says. “If I can’t argue for the party that I belong to, then I have no right to be in that party. I have to be true to myself.” On his 57th birthday, the last day of the Republican National Convention, Patrosso changed his registration from Republican to ‘decline-to-state.’ He brought a friend along to take pictures of this major life event.

On Election Day, when Mark Patrosso walks into the voting booth, he’ll be choosing a Democrat for president for the first time. He says he has no regrets, because even though he built so much of his identity and community around being a Republican, Patrosso says he can’t sacrifice his values for a political party.

Outside the courthouse in the city of Riverside housing speculators sit in lawn chairs — protected from the mid-day sun by little blue awnings — and place their bids in the daily home foreclosure auction.

The same scene plays out every week day in San Bernardino, Chino, Fontana and other Inland Empire cities. Behind each auction is someone who reached out for the American Dream but couldn’t hold on.

On a road trip to take the political pulse of this growing region, The California Report’s Scott Shafer talked with homeowners losing their grasp and investors scooping up properties at a discount — who say they are re-energizing the area’s economy and helping it recover from the crushing effects of the recession.

But it will take a long time for the Inland Empire to bounce back from the mortgage meltdown. The region boomed in the last decade, then suffered the second highest home foreclosure rate in the country. It still struggles with 13 percent unemployment, higher than the state average.

The recession has left many in the Inland Empire feeling politically irrelevant and overlooked, in spite of the fact that the region is home to 4 million people, larger than many states.

In his reporting, Shafer found people working to create a stronger political voice for the region. And this election year could be key.

Though the Inland Empire has long been a Republican stronghold, many of the new arrivals from coastal cities are more likely to be Democrats. That means that several congressional elections here are now hotly contested. And with both parties campaigning hard, the Inland Empire could get what it’s been craving: attention from politicians.

We’re six months out and the 2012 presidential race is gearing up. President Barack Obama and presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney are moving into general election mode. And the Super PACs that support them — and can raise and spend unlimited amounts of money — are charging into the race.

The cash is flowing. The ads are flying. But what will voters take from it all?

The Obama campaign announced it would spend $25 million on ads just in the month of May. The first salvo is a strictly positive ad, touting the president’s hard work to dig the country out of the recession he inherited.

Meanwhile Americans For Prosperity, the conservative Super PAC, has unleashed its own anti-Obama ads, complete with allegations that American tax dollars meant for green job stimulus have been spent overseas.

It’s going to be a long, expensive and probably vitriolic election season. And while California is likely to be spared some of the vitriol, since it’s not a swing state, the question remains: What do we the voters get out of all of this?

The other day KQED got to be a fly on the wall at a couple of political focus groups conducted by the Public Policy Institute of California. The pair of round-table sessions probed the concerns and priorities of Democrats and then Republicans.

Of course the two groups had different views on taxes and spending and the role of government. They even used different language: Democrats talked about kicking in a little more to “help the weak,” while Republicans worried about too much government “taking away our freedom.”

What the groups shared was a sense of frustration with partisan gridlock and the role of money in politics. Is there any way in this election season to cut through the diatribe and engage in some constructive dialogue? That’s what we’ll be trying to do here.